To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport when (a) Ministers and (b) officials have held meetings in the last 12 months with casino operators interested in securing licences under the Gambling Act 2005; where each meeting took place; and what was discussed. (83371)

Under the Gambling Act 2005, local authorities acting in their capacity as licensing authorities will be responsible for issuing the one regional, eight large and eight small new casino licences permitted by the Act. Licensing authorities will be required to run the competitions for these licences in a fair and open way. These competitions are not expected to begin until mid-2007, and the identities of the bidding companies will not be known until then.

DCMS Ministers and officials have met frequently with casino and other companies that may be interested in bidding, and their representative bodies. These meetings have covered all aspects of the implementation of the Gambling Act and wider gambling policy, and are part of our regular and ongoing consultation with the gambling industry, local authorities and other stakeholders. Those meetings that have been identified that have taken place since 1 January 2006 are listed in the following table, and all these meetings took place in the UK.

Details of earlier meetings that may be relevant were included in my reply of 20 December 2005, Official Report, columns 2654-6W to the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss).

One further meeting has been identified, which was inadvertently omitted from my earlier reply: DCMS officials and I met Detlef Kornett, Managing Director of the Anschutz Group in London on 7 July 2003. The minutes of this meeting were published on the DCMS website as part of a response dated 26 July 2005 to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act.

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what (a) rights of appeal and (b) avenues to reopen decisions are available to those local authorities who have had their applications for a regional casino rejected by the Casino Advisory Panel. (84130)

The process for considering local authority proposals for regional casinos is a matter within the discretion of the Casino Advisory Panel having regard to published criteria and to Government policy. Local authorities have no rights of appeal to the panel. The panel, however, has given interested parties the opportunity to submit further relevant information. The deadline for any such information was 28 June 2006.